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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!bogus.sura.net!ra!wintermute.phys.psu.edu!news From: kenh@leps5.phys.psu.edu (Ken Hornstein) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Problems installing NetBSD to coexist with DOS. Date: 22 Apr 1993 07:33:48 -0400 Organization: Penn State, Laboratory for Elementary Particle Science Lines: 83 Message-ID: <1r5vqs$ah5@leps5.phys.psu.edu> References: <1627@rook.ukc.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: leps5.phys.psu.edu In article <1627@rook.ukc.ac.uk> dac@ukc.ac.uk (David Clear) writes: >[NetBSD installation woes] Don't feel that dumb ... I've ran into the EXACT same problems! Luckily, I had a copy of pfdisk on an 386BSD boot floppy, so I wasn't totally screwed. I used the numbers from pfdisk and fed them into the installation script, and everything seemed fine also. >I played around with the numbers and found a start sector number which >I think didn't hit the DOS partition. I gave these to the NetBSD >install program and the install started. >At the point where the disklabel happens, it said: > >"Overwriting disk with DOS partition table? (n):" > >This threw me as it's not in the install notes and I haven't a clue >what it's asking. Is it saying it's just going to stamp on a disk >which HAS a DOS partition table or is it saying it's going to WRITE a >DOS partition table or that the disk area it's writing to is COVERED by >an existing DOS partition? Anyway, whether I entered 'y' or 'n' the >results were the same (it seems). I really hate this; I ran into the exact same problems with disklabel when I was trying to do disk partitioning under 386BSD. Talk about a worthless message! But the results are different; if you hit "y", then all you get is the NetBSD partition; if you hit "n", then all you get is the MSDOS parition. >After the install, which went fine and the OS did boot from the hard >disk, I rebooted from an MSDOS system floppy and ran FDISK again to >look at the partition table. The only entry in there was the NetBSD >root partition of type 'NON_DOS'. Yup, same here. >I checked the install notes for 386BSD and that says to make just one >partition for DOS and just leave the rest of the disk uncovered by any >DOS partition. I haven't tried that yet but will do later. Will the >NetBSD install program append that unreferenced disk area to the DOS >partition table? Is that how it's meant to work? If that's the case, >how do I find the sector size and offset of that area? I made a 386BSD boot floppy before and I installed pfdisk, from the bootmenu package (comp.sources.misc, volume 15). That's the only way I made it this far. I did manage to get one step farther; remembering that 386BSD wanted a parition ID of 165, I used pfdisk to make a parition with that ID number. _then_ when I installed, I didn't get that damn message from disklabel. Unfortunately, now when I get to the point where I use install disk 2, I get the message "panic: init failed" :-( >Finally, the NetBSD system I installed worked fine. Except that, >doesn't 386BSD have a 'reboot -todos' command or something similar? I >couldn't find a way to take the system down so it would reboot to DOS. > >Now something a little worrying. After completely bogging the >installation, I tried to re-install DOS. I rebooted from the DOS5.0 >install disk and it said 'Determining your configuration', accessed the >disk and hang. I had to boot from another system floppy and use FDISK >/MBR (and my DOS manual doesn't actually quote what that command >does). Also, before I have completely wrecked a 386BSD installation to >the point where in would no longer install from scratch correctly. >This was because the geometry on the disk label was wrong. This really drove me bonkers too; I had to take my disk to another computer, comment out the call to SETUP in the autoexec.bat so I could use FDISK :-( >I think this is awful. What crud is the installation leaving on the >disk to make it know it has been there before? Is there any way to >remove it? Try a low-level format; worked for me. >Anyway, all that doesn't worry me right now. I've got two days left - >help would be appreciated!! I'm sure this sort of thing is a breeze if >you know PCs. While I am by no means a PC whiz, I feel that this installation procedure is severely lacking for NetBSD. I don't mean to criticize the NetBSD gang; when I installed it on the whole hard drive, I really loved it. But unfortunately I need to have it co-exist with DOS. Anyone know what we are doing wrong? --Ken